Barnett Shale Fracking Victims Win First Round in Court Battle with Gas Industry

Julie-Dermansky-022
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Legal tremors are reverberating in the Barnett Shale region in Texas after yesterday’s $2.925 million dollar verdict in favor of the plaintiffs Bob and Lisa Parr, who sued Aruba Petroleum for damages to their health and the devaluation of their home in a fracking nuisance case.

Earthworks energy program director Bruce Baizel stated in a press release that the juryโ€™s decision is important for twoย reasons:

โ€œWhen evidence of frackingโ€™s impacts are shown to an impartial jury in a court of law, they find them to be real and significant.ย And it shows why the fracking industry is reluctant to allow lawsuits of this type to go to trial. Instead fracking companies try to force out of court settlements that gag the harmed family as a condition for financial compensation. They almost always succeed, hiding from the public the proof of frackingโ€™s dangers. Consequently, industry and government continue claiming fracking is harmless.ย We hope this lawsuit will make regulators, in Texas and around the country, reexamine their assumptions about frackingโ€™s dangers, and their responsibility to keep the publicย safe.โ€

The Parrs were part of an Earthworks’ study entitled โ€œNatural Gas Flowback: The Dark Side of the Boom.โ€ The study complied data on the health effects of hydraulic fracking and gas industry activities in the Barnettย Shale.

According to the report, Lisa Parr’s blood and lungs were tested by Dr. William Rae of the Environmental Health Center in Dallas. The report states that Dr. Rae โ€œfound more than 20 chemicals, including six that matched the VOCs detected by TCEQโ€™s air sampling of the wellย site.โ€

The Parrsโ€™ neighbors, the Ruggieros, also had to deal with the health consequences and nuisances caused by Aruba Petroleumโ€™s operations including noise and air pollution. They settled and signed a confidentiality agreement. Though Tim Ruggiero doesn’t discuss the settlement or Aruba Petroleum, he wrote a personal essay, โ€œLeaving Gasland,โ€ concluding that for him โ€œLeaving Gasland is not winning, itโ€™s merely an end toย losing.โ€

Aruba Petroleum released a statement to ThinkProgress today stating, โ€œThe facts of theย case and the law as applied to those facts do not support the verdict,โ€ andย that โ€œAruba is an experienced oil and gas operator that is in compliance withinย the air quality limits set byย the Texas Railroad Commission and theย Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.โ€ย ย 

The Parr case has already started to redefine what winning can look like, even though Aruba Petroleum is likely toย appeal.

โ€œWe hope this lawsuit will make regulators, in Texas and around the country, reexamine their assumptions about frackingโ€™s dangers, and their responsibility to keep the public safe,โ€ Baizelย says.

Here is a slide show of images taken in the Barnett Shale region inย Texas.

Julie-Dermansky-022
Julie Dermansky is a multimedia reporter and artist based in New Orleans. She is an affiliate scholar at Rutgers Universityโ€™s Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights. Visit her website at www.jsdart.com.

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